The HSA Foundation has issued a new standard which can match up graphics chips, processors and other hardware to boost things like video search.

The downside is that Intel and Nvidia to not appear to have been involved in the creation of the version 1.0 of its Heterogeneous System Architecture specification.

What the standard would mean is that compute, graphics and digital-signal processors will be able to directly address the same physical RAM in a more cache-coherent manner. It will mean the end of external buses and loosely linked interconnects, and allow data to be processed at the same time.

A GPU and CPU can work on the same bits of memory in an application in a multi-threaded way. The spec refers to GPUs and DSPs as "kernel agents" which sounds a bit like corporate spies for KFC.

The blueprints support 64-bit and 32-bit, and map out virtual memory, memory coherency, and message passing, programming models, and hardware requirements.

While the standard is backed by AMD, ARM, Imagination Technologies, MediaTek, Qualcomm, and Samsung, Intel and Nvidia are giving it a miss. The thought is that with these names onboard there should be a enough of a critical mass of developers who will build HSA-compliant games and tools.

AMD has announced its third annual developer summit that will kick off on November 11th in San Jose, California. It's called APU13, and it is worth noting that previous AMD developer summits were pretty much where the Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) Foundation was formed. The developer summits hosted by AMD are certainly quite an interesting event and has become a thing to keep an eye on in the semicon industry.

Judging by the APU13 agenda, we'll see some updates from the HSA Foundation members that have been working on a standards-based heterogeneous compute (HC) ecosystem as well as the first AMD Ventures Innovation Summit that will shed some light on software and application development companies that utilize and expand uses for AMD solutions.

Phil Rogers, corporate fellow at AMD and president of the HSA Foundation noted that this year's summit will be used to build on the AMD commitment to lead the heterogeneous computing era and bring together technology influencers from all over the world to share in our vision and strategy for an open standard HC ecosystem.

Jon Peddie, principal and founder of Jon Peddie Research noted that previous two developer summits exceeded his expectations and were actually a place for an open and instructive exchange of ideas on software development, tools and APIs, free from the marketing hype that you get at many conferences.

AMD is certainly staying true to its commitement with the HSA Foundation as well as the heteregeneous compute ecosystem and fruits of its labor are certainly starting to be noticed.

HSA Foundation has been on quite a roll lately. It managed to gather quite a few names to back its cause and today Sony, ST-Ericsson and STMicroelectronics joined the group.

The HSA Foundation now includes AMD, ARM, Imagination, Mediatek, Qualcomm, Samsung and Texas Instruments as "founders" and a bunch of other big names including LG Electronics, Vivante, Arteris, Codeplay and others as either promoters, supporters or contributors to the Foundation. The HSA Foundation also managed to draw a couple of big names to its "academics" group including HTHU Programming Language and System Software labs, University of Bristol, University of Edinburgh and the University of Illinois.

Today, those numbers swell to 23 as Sony, ST-Ericsson and STMicroelectronics joined up as contributors to the Foundation. Sony is obviously the biggest name today and we are quite sure that they will be able to "contribute" to the group and, of course, ST-Ericsson and STMicroelectronics will surely be a valued addition to the Foundation.

The announcement has not been officially released but those names can be clearly seen on HSA Foundation site. Interestingly enough, the Foundation is still to get its eight "founder" key member and we are quite sure that some big name will join up eventually.

The HSA Foundation has announced that LG Electronics has joined its cause. Although it has not joined the HSA Foundation as a "founder" but rather as a promoter, LG Electronics' diverse portfolio and industry experience will certainly be valuable additions to the HSA Foundation.

LG Electronics' diverse portfolio and fusion with the HSA Foundation will open up new possibilities, bring a whole new level of interactivity for consumers and as well as give the HSA Foundation a greater depth in the smartphone, tablets, TV, digital cameras, game consoles and even e-reader space.

Phil Rogers' HSA Foundation President and AMD Corporate Fellow noted that LG is known for bringing innovative products to market and their decision to embrace the HSA vision will reinforce the importance of driving and developing a standard across the industry.

Seung-Jong Choi, Vice President of DTV SoC Department, SIC Lab, LG Electronics Inc. noted that LG is evaluating the SoC core technology trend and looking into a way to bring innovative and competitive SoCs to market and expressed confidence that joining the HSA Foundation will achieve fruitful results and help LG to continue to innovate in that department.

Back when Samsung joined the HSA Foundation as a "founding member" we could not happen to wonder which companies would take the remaining last two places alongside AMD, Imagination, Texas Instruments, Samsung and Mediatek, but today, Qualcomm has jumped in as a founding member.

HSA Foundation has been doing quite well since its formation in June and many companies gladly joined up as a Founder, Supporter, Contributor or Associate members and it is no wonder that Phil Rogers, HSA Foundation President and AMD corporate Fellow has expressed its excitement to see Qualcomm as one of the driving forces of the HSA Foundation. Phil Rogers noted that "It’s great to see an innovative company like Qualcomm, which has revolutionized the wireless communications market, placing their support behind HSA." and added that "With HSA, computing becomes much more power efficient, enabling member companies like Qualcomm, to create unique and compelling experiences for the consumer."

Qualcomm's Jim Thompson, Senior Vice President of Engineering, noted that future Snapdragon processors will have more computing performance and integrated parallel processing technology in order to meet the high performance and low power needs for mobile customers, thus joining the HSA Foundation will allow developers to deliver faster and more innovative applications on future Snapdragon processors if certain aspects of heterogeneous computing are standardized.

The HSA Foundation was created back in June at AMD's Fusion Developer Summit as a foundation that will deliver new user experiences through advances in computing architectures in order to improve power efficiency, performance, programmability, portability across computing devices and general support of software across a broad spectrum of devices in order to remove the need for code rewriting for various different platforms.

Some key players on the market have already joined the HSA Foundation and we would not be surprised to see more big names in the near future. The HSA Foundation will be present at both the IEEE International Conference on Computer Design and 2012 ARM TechCon where it will be delivering technical presentations.

The IFA 2012 show in Berlin was a good show for AMD as well, or to be precise, it was good for the HSA (Heterogeneous System Architecture) Foundation founded by AMD, ARM, Texas Instruments, Imagination and Mediatek. Samsung has joined up alongside six new members.

The HSA Foundation was created back in June at AMD's Fusion Developer Summit as a foundation that will deliver new user experiences through advances in computing architectures in order to improve power efficiency, performance, programmability, portability across computing devices and general support of software across a broad spectrum of devices in order to remove the need for code rewriting for various different platforms.

Senior Manager of Technology Marketing at AMD, Sasa Marinkovic, noted on the AMD blog that there is no doubt that the HSA Foundation is off to a good start and in addition to Samsung, they are more than happy to welcome six additional companies including Apical, Arteris, MulticoreWare, Sonics, Symbio and Vivante.

HSA Foundation is definitely heading in the right direction and with the addition of Samsung, we just can't stop wondering what big companies will fill the remaining two "hexes" in the HSA foundation.

We already wrote that AMD is preparing a couple of big announcements during its AMD Fusion Developer Summit, and the non-profit consortium between AMD, ARM, Imagination, MediaTek and Texas Instruments known as the Heteogeneous System Architecture (HSA) Foundation, is apparently just a start of big things to come.

In case you missed it, the AMD Fusion Developer Summit is currently being held at Bellevue, WA. According to AMD, The HSA Foundation is a non-profit consortiom established to define and promote an open, standards-based approach to heterogeneous computing that will provide a common hardware specification and broad support ecosystem to make it easer for software developers to deliver innovative applications that can take greater advantage of today's modern processors.

AMD, ARM, Imagination Technlogoies, MediaTek and Texas Instruments are the initial founding members of the HSA Foundation but there has been an indication or two that more companies will surely follow. The main goal of the HSA Foundation is the actual standardizing of the heterogeneous programming model so developers could easily and cost-effectively develop new software that will take advantage of the US $55.5B processor market and take greater advantage of capabilities found in modern CPUs and GPUs, or in AMD's case APUs.

The HSA Foundation will surely put some pressure on Intel. You can check out more about HSA Foundation here.